Tag / feminism

We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.

Season 4, Episode 13 “Hopeless”

By Nerdy Spice

In an episode that embodies the classic, largely extinct phenomenon known as the “pre-February-sweeps filler episode,” Joey strikes a devil’s bargain with Mrs. Valentine to get time off for the senior trip. The sitch is that Pacey and Joey have to accompany Drue on his date with Anna Evans, the daughter of the head of the board, which Mrs. Valentine forced him to go on in order to further her social ascent or something. Mrs. Valentine lays out what we writers like to call “the stakes” in highly literal terms: “If she does [have a nice time], the days off are yours.” Little does she know how high the stakes actually are: no less than Joey Potter’s seemingly indestructible virginity is at stake. Buuut more on that from Janes later.

To be honest my alliance with her was always a little bit… involuntary, you might say. She’s got an in (if you know what I mean) with Stanley, the mogul of the Austen family that owns my TV network. And she’s effing devious. If I weren’t aligned with her, she’d have made my life hell. But also, I mean, we have a lot in common. We both care about fitness and our careers so much. She’s an awesome workout partner, and she’s really fun when she’s in a good mood, like when you get her drunk and she actually eats something (because it takes the edge off her hanger), or like when she’s just delivered a really satisfying tongue-lashing to a subordinate.

Every week our fake advice column answers a question from a character on Dietland.

Dear Adversion,

So, I kind of made a deposit on my weight-loss surgery today.

As you know, Verena and her organization, Calliope House, had offered me all this money to go through some kind of awareness-raising program. I was going to use the money to get the surgery, but the program sucked! First, I went off my meds and did some pretty bonkers stuff. This week, it got even worse.

Every week our fake advice column answers a question from a character on Dietland.

Dear Adversion,

YOU HAVE TO HELP ME.

OK, so I took your advice from last week. I threw out all my meds, and I went back to this woman Verena Baptist and told her I was in for whatever her super secret happiness plan was. And she told me that her plan was all about being kind to myself, and wrote me the promised check for twenty grand ahead of time! So far, so good, right?

Every week our fake advice column answers a question from a character on Dietland.

Dear Adversion,

My name is Plum Kettle. Recently I’ve been trying to drop enough weight to qualify for weight-loss surgery. It took all I had just to lose a pound this week, and I still have fifteen more to go before I qualify for surgery. I’ve been working as a ghostwriter for an online advice column (solidarity, sister!) at a beauty website called Daisy Chain owned by a big conglomerate called Austen Media. The site’s run by Kitty, a gorgeous red-haired woman with terrifyingly taut biceps, who treats me like shit and has an inflated notion of her own brilliance. I like to write fiction on the side, but it’s not going anywhere, and I don’t date because guys never look at me because, as you probably gathered, I’m fat.

The first people to appear onscreen in the series premiere of Dynasty, Josh Schwartz’s modernized remake of the classic show, are the Trumps: Donald, Ivanka, Tiffany, Trump Junior, and Eric are at a ribbon cutting ceremony. This is followed by a shot of the Kardashians.

I take this as a declaration of intent: Like Gossip Girl and The OC before it, the latest Josh Schwartz creation is going to be about rich people. But this time it’s not those quiet, repressed, Emily Gilmore-type rich people who seem to throw big parties precisely in order to avoid having scenes. These are rich people who throw parties in order to have more witnesses when they do make a scene. These are rich people for the age of reality TV! We aren’t on the Upper East Side anymore, baby.

“My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later,” says Julia, the narrator of Claire Messud’s new novel The Burning Girl; “…everyone loses a best friend at some point.”

Julia is quiet, cautious, and sensitive; her soon-to-be-lost best friend is Cassie, a fragile-looking, “troubled” girl, much more daring and eventually more popular. As Dwight Garner observed in The New York Times, “This pairing is a familiar one”–so many other novels about female friendships, from my favorite YA novel Someone Like Youto recent literary phenom My Brilliant Friend, seem to feature the same general contrast. And it seems to be the universal inclination of writers (many of whom are quiet and sensitive) to narrate from the point of view of the less daring, the less dynamic friend—the friend with less story to tell. The narrator then spends so much time looking at her friend, watching her, resisting her stories rather than driving forward her own, that the novel’s center of gravity rests between narrator and friend, rather than centering on the narrator.